Geographical convenience to Asia may have driven Palo Alto Networks to choose Singapore over Australia for its Asia-Pacific headquarters, but the company's Australian customers will nonetheless benefit as the fast-growing security firm builds up its regional technical capabilities.

The new facility not only relocates a previous sales-based office but adds a regional cyber security lab that will offer first-hand experience with a range of security technologies including advanced persistent threat (APT) protection, firewalls, Intrusion Detection Systems, and URL filtering. Hands-on demonstrations and proof-of-concept testing will also be conducted from the site.

"Over the last couple of years we've been investing heavily in local resources," A/NZ regional director Armando Dacal told CSO Australia.

"The Asia-Pacific is by far our fastest-growing region, and customers are no longer equipped for addressing the modern threats and attacks that cyber criminals are employing. The establishment of a lab will help us provide further insights into local attacks – providing greater researcher into the threats happening in the Australian and Asia-Pacific markets."

The company is investing both in customer-facing specialists and back-end technical resources to bolster its capabilities in security research and development.

Those resources will, among other things, be supporting a growing Australian user base that is rapidly expanding from traditional security-conscious financial services and technology companies, to reach "very large deployments" in education, state and federal government agencies, and the like.

"As you onboard larger customers, that obviously becomes a larger attack vector," Dacal said. "Making sure you can provide customers with not just great technology, but great insights into the threat landscape and what's happening, becomes critical."

Palo Alto Networks' arsenal of security tools will soon get another member after the company confirmed the $US200 million ($A218m) acquisition of endpoint-protection company Cyvera.

"The endpoint is the newest frontier sophisticated attacks," Dacal said.

"We're seeing the endpoint playing a larger and larger role in terms of exploits: every year there are thousands of vulnerabilities addressed within those endpoints. But traditional signature based endpoint technologies aren't keeping up. Our acquisition of Cyvera gives us the ability to address the endpoint market in a disruptive and automated way."

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